Discontinuation of VenueGo

Handango has been the leading provider of mobile software for everything from Android to Symbian OS since 1999. In that time, we have amassed a large market share in the mobile application space and our applications have been downloaded by tens of millions of individual users. In a market report in 2014, more than 30% of mobile phones contained at least one (1) Handango Go application. Handango has been the largest provider of mobile applications, and in 2015 we were approached by a publicly traded software company to develop VenueGo, a venue management software.

When our team heard of the idea, our board and shareholders were ecstatic. Generally, mobile applications are one-off payments, and while the Handango app marketplace was generating several million dollars annually through this approach, a recurring revenue model, as well as market share in the rapidly growing SaaS industry, was of great interest. In May of 2015, the Handango developers put on their thinking caps and built the first prototype of VenueGo in only 4 months.

VenueGo entered beta testing in September of 2015 and remained in that stage for 12 months. In September of 2016, GoPlan had a private launch to a small portion of our customer base that expressed purchase intent in the beta. Around the same time, Handango had technical troubles, citing datacenter outages leading to service downtime and minor data loss, natural disasters in our Philippines support office, among other complications that led to a pause of development in our software and reduction of our workforce.

While our mobile app marketplace and other applications were able to survive due to their self-sufficient nature, VenueGo required continued maintenance, bug fixes, and development of new features. We regret to inform all customers that VenueGo will be discontinued as of April 30th, 2017 11:59 PM EST. All customers will be issued a prorated refund on the remaining time left on their subscription.

The current customer base has been notified and we are actively working with Gather to port all VenueGo data to their platform and provide previous VenueGo customers with 3 months of Gather, paid for by the Handango team. We recommend all current customers to use Gather as their new venue management software. While we regret to announce the discontinuation and termination of the VenueGo service, we end the service knowing that the team at Gather will tend to Handango’s VenueGo customers better than we could have ourselves.